Senseless
by QWERTYfaced
Summary: Neal Caffrey always thought he lived by his wits, but then something deprives him of one of his senses. One premise, five short standalone scenarios, each progressively whumpier. (It's a new word.) Part 5/5, "The Philosophy of Darkness", now up. [COMPLETE. Neal!whump, gen, angst. Warning for major depression, suicidal ideation. Please don't read if that's triggery.]
1. Bitter Lasts Longest

**Title:** Senseless: Bitter Lasts Longest  
**Author:** QWERTYfaced  
**Wordcount:** ~550  
**Rating:** PG  
**Characters:** Neal Caffrey  
**Genre:** Angst  
**Notes:** Part 1 of 5 of the "Senseless" exercise. [Depression and minor Neal!whump.]  
**Summary:** Neal Caffrey always thought he lived by his wits, but then something deprives him of one of his senses. One premise, five short standalone scenarios, each progressively whumpier. (It's a new word.) Part 1: Sense of taste.  
**Disclaimer:** This is a work of fanfiction. All characters and settings belong to their respective copyright holders, not me. Which is why I don't have my own evil lair yet.

* * *

_1. Bitter Lasts Longest_

The doctor told him that the bullet that clipped the angle of his jaw had also partially severed his lingual nerve. The damage to the muscle, to the skin lying atop it was easily reparable, but he had probably lost forever the ability to taste with that side of his tongue—or at least the front two-thirds of that side of his tongue.

It really hadn't sounded as though it would matter. In fact, he'd laughed it off, a little embarrassed by the seeming smallness of the issue.

If you narrowly escape being shot in the head, a small scar and the loss of a third of your sense of taste should be a trivial cost.

Only now that the scar was fading was he starting to wonder.

It was better to be alive, of _course_ it was...

Everyone knew that Neal Caffrey loved the finer things of life. And yes, he could still enjoy the exquisite in an example of musical virtuosity, a masterful work of art, a perfectly tailored suit, an expert game of chess.

Fine wines and fine foods?

Well, it wasn't that he couldn't taste them anymore. He could. After all, most of the sensation of taste is the sense of smell, and that was unaffected. But somehow, by some strange alchemy, nothing was _right_. The refined tastes he'd adored were transformed, because the doctors had been wrong, and the damaged nerve still transmitted one signal:

Bitter.

Bitter, bitter, shouted over and over with the maddening, piercing persistence of an obsessive with a single-word vocabulary. Bitter, almost always, no matter what he tried to eat or drink.

He'd never known there was so much in life that was bitter. He found it in the most unlikely places. It was a discordant one-note theme that endlessly muddled the symphony.

And time and again, the cognitive dissonance made him put down fork or glass.

He still went to dinner at the Burkes' whenever Elizabeth invited him, and naturally, he ate every bite, smiled and told her how wonderful it all was. But only because his praise made her face light up with pleasure; only because her gift of kindness, unasked and undeserved, was a debt he could never adequately repay. He would never be so ungracious or ungrateful as to forget that.

But...

Mozzie didn't come around as much anymore. Their conversations flowed less freely without a glass or two to linger over, and all the wine had been moved to Mozzie's place, anyway. Neal drank water alone in the evenings, and even there, that one insistent note pushed its way in.

He ate when he remembered that he had to in order to survive. Ate bland food, as free from taste as possible, because spices and seasonings were no longer something he could enjoy.

He went to work, where his tracking anklet would forever set him apart, even once it was gone.

He sat at his desk every morning at nine. Read endless forms. Waited to be called upon.

And he drank coffee to keep himself alert. Bureau coffee, because what difference did it make anymore? The taste was on his tongue for hours, wrenchingly strong at first, never quite dying away.

It was bitter.

* * *

**Author's postscript:** The loss or impairment of the sense of taste, though often little regarded by outsiders, not uncommonly causes depression. (Although not as prevalently as damage to the sense of smell. And that's next in this little exercise.)


	2. Would Smell as Sweet

**Title:** Senseless: Would Smell as Sweet  
**Author:** QWERTYfaced  
**Wordcount:** ~1100  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Characters:** Neal Caffrey, Peter Burke  
**Genre:** Angst  
**Notes:** Part 2 of 5 of the "Senseless" exercise. [Depression and Neal!whump.]  
**Summary:** Neal Caffrey always thought he lived by his wits, but then something deprives him of one of his senses. One premise, five short standalone scenarios, each progressively whumpier. (It's a new word.) Part 2: Sense of smell.  
**Disclaimer:** This is a work of fanfiction. All characters and settings belong to their respective copyright holders, not me. Which is why I don't have my own army of robotic kittens yet.

* * *

_2. Would Smell as Sweet_

Neal supposed it was his own fault, really.

He'd gotten a little too accustomed to being around agents, a little too accustomed to having backup, a little too accustomed to chasing instead of running. So when the suspect—confronted and proved guilty, by logic if not by law—broke and ran, Neal shouted for the van contingent...and chased.

In the old days, he never would have been so stupid. Or at the very least, he would have remembered how reckless it is to blindly follow someone around a sharp corner.

Some time later, he awoke to darkness and beeping and the worst headache of his life. Fuzzy from anesthesia, with his face strangely numb, he would have panicked were it not for Peter's strong, steady voice telling him that he was in a hospital.

The fear subsided, but it was replaced by confusion—because why hadn't he figured that out?

Maybe it was the anesthesia. Or the concussion. Or maybe...maybe it was something else.

He heard with some satisfaction that the punch that laid him out also broke the assailant's hand. Skulls are hard ("Particularly yours. Why can't you remember it's not your job to catch the suspect, Caffrey?"), hand bones are not.

The reason he couldn't see? Well, apparently he had the most spectacular pair of black eyes it had ever been Peter's privilege to see. They were still swollen shut.

The numbness? Peter hesitated, and called in a doctor to explain. And Neal learned a new word.

_Ethmoid._ The root was Greek, and it meant "sieve-like." A tiny, porous bone right between the eyes. Brittle. Easily fractured.

There had been surgery. He'd probably have minimal scarring, but there were now tiny wires permanently integrated into his skull, holding things together.

Hey, he'd said, maybe now he'd pick up those secret FBI radio signals Mozzie mentioned the other day. Peter snorted a laugh, but the unseen doctor's voice was unnervingly gentle as she told him that there could be some complications. They'd run a few tests once the inflammation had gone down.

Two days later, he'd stared straight ahead while a hand held a tiny packet of ammonia by his face. He could feel the faint astringency against his lips, but otherwise it could have been water for all he knew.

Imaging followed, sophisticated tests that involved lying perfectly still while things clanked and groaned around him. There was nervous banter, and waiting, and then Neal learned another new word.

_Anosmia._ No sense of smell. The olfactory nerve was severed.

Hell, Neal had said, there goes my celebrated palate. He kept his voice light for Peter's sake, and shot him a wink from an eye still ringed by livid bruises. ("You'll have to learn how to appreciate _cuisine_, Peter, or else what will El do now?") Peter rolled his eyes, waited while Neal checked out of the hospital, and then drove him to June's.

Somehow, it didn't feel quite like home anymore. His welcome-back dinner was texture and not much else. He sipped a glass of whiskey to feel the burn against his tongue and cheeks, then went to bed with his head spinning from the combination of painkillers and alcohol.

The next morning, his skull felt as if it had been stuffed with cotton. He went instinctively to his easel and started to work on his latest painting, but for the first time, this refuge failed to satisfy. It all felt flat, like something was missing, and his brushstrokes didn't have the same fluidity.

He was cleaning his brushes and putting them away before realization hit. Mozzie had once said that art was Neal's mistress. It was a joke, and a little cliché, but it wasn't wrong. Neal would go to his easel or his sketchbook like a man settling into the arms of a lover, seeking ease or excitement or comfort.

Oils had always been his favorite—his mistress in rich silk velvet, perfumed, decadent and sensual. The harsh scent of paint thinner was the dagger at her thigh, that hint of sharpness that adds piquancy, that intoxicates and obsesses.

He tried to deny the conclusion for as long as he could, leaving a trail of art supplies from one end of the loft to the other as he tried again and again and again. Pastels (soft, powdered, innocent), charcoal (sultry and dangerous), ink (cool and devious)...his first and truest love slipped through his fingers, her body disappearing beneath his desperate grasp.

Only when the light started to fade did he admit defeat. He cleaned up stoically, methodically putting everything away. He pushed the easel into a dark corner, facing the walls. He was meticulous.

The only thing he missed was a fragment of pencil, snapped in two and flung into a corner.

A few weeks later, bruises faded and stitches gone, he returned to the office. While hands clapped him on the shoulder, he smiled and sipped from the first cup of Bureau coffee that he could drink without wanting to spit. There were jokes about that, and Neal joined in the persiflage, hoping it would cover the things he didn't want to show.

Seven people offered to buy him lunch that day. He was both touched and taken aback, but decided it was nothing more than a gesture of camaraderie on his first day back.

The next days were less easily explained. Diana handed him an entire packet of egg rolls. ("I don't want them. I don't even really like them. The delivery guy must have screwed up.") Neal would have believed her more if it weren't for the fact that people kept leaving doughnuts and sandwiches on his desk. He was starting to feel like he was manning a craft services table.

That weekend, he discovered that none of his belts fit anymore, even cinched to their smallest circumference. He'd avoided mirrors after one shuddering glance when he first got out of the hospital, but he forced himself to stand in front of one now. A pale, scarred ghost regarded him from beyond the frame.

Neal shuddered again, then forced himself to eat breakfast. Without the context of proper taste, the act of chewing felt repulsive. He realized now that he'd have to learn to deal with it, but the food stuck in his throat, then sat in his stomach like a lump of clay.

Suddenly tired, he shucked off the clothes that no longer fit and crawled back into bed. He tried to ignore the faint disorientation that crept over him when he closed his eyes, but found himself longing for reassurance. When June's housekeeper washed the linens, they always came back faintly scented with crisp, bittersweet lavender. The smell meant "home," and "safe haven," where June's kind and tolerant eyes always welcomed him, regardless of who or what he was.

Without that smell, he could be anywhere. He could be back to the old rootless life, city-hopping, living out of a dizzying parade of hotels. He could be lost.

Why can't you remember it's not your job to catch the suspect, Caffrey?


	3. Plate 413

**Title: **Senseless: Plate 413  
**Author:** QWERTYfaced  
**Fandom:** White Collar  
**Wordcount:** ~1000  
**Rating:** PG  
**Characters:** Neal Caffrey  
**Genre:** Angst  
**Notes:** Part 3 of 5 of the "Senseless" exercise: touch. [Depression and Neal!whump.]  
**Summary:** Neal Caffrey always thought he lived by his wits, but then something deprives him of one of his senses. One premise, five short standalone scenarios, each progressively whumpier. (It's a new word.)  
**Disclaimer:** This is a work of fanfiction. All characters and settings belong to their respective copyright holders, not me. Which is why I don't have a hovercraft yet.

* * *

In the end, he always came back to the book.

It was a formidable work of art—page after page of darkly beautiful engravings, with their delicately muted tinting, finely limned shading, and careful lettering. Generations of physicians had learned from it. So had artists.

And it held a fatal fascination for Neal Caffrey, months after what people generally referred to, cautiously and euphemistically, as "the incident."

It was an infuriatingly benign term.

The _incident_ could send him back to the helplessness of childhood in the middle of the night. In some ways, it was worse than childhood. He knew that there was no comforting figure to call, no one to soothe him with gentle words, reassure him that the terrors in his mind were all just a dream.

Because it wasn't _just_ a dream. It was memory.

In the darkness, the clinging sheets fitted themselves into a groove invisibly tattooed against his throat, and the mattress's warm pressure against his back echoed the bulk of a body. He remembered the scratch of linen suiting on a forearm locked around his neck, and the strange, uncomfortable intimacy of being a human shield. He remembered the knife that had been held against his side.

Most of all, he remembered the moment it all came apart.

The wordless signal from Peter. The abrupt wrench away from his captor. The jerk of the knife.

Peculiarly, he couldn't remember what the cut itself felt like, the bright steel slicing through yielding tissue. What he recalled was a sudden rush of sensations, as if every cell in his body was surprised, all at once. A deathly chill, then autoclave heat; vision darkening and then exploding into effervescent light; a sudden drop into numb, acoustic-tiled silence.

When it cleared away, the man with the knife was on the ground and moaning from gunshots Neal hadn't heard. And a white-faced Peter had his hands clenched around Neal's upper arm. In the breathless, endless microsecond before the pain hit, he looked down and saw blood dripping through the elbow of his jacket.

Days were lost to anesthesia, and the fog of pain and opiates. His first clear moment stood out in contrast, every shape and color laser-cut and pitilessly bright. He had stared past the bandages at his right hand, limp and curled in on itself, and realized with a slow, creeping horror that he could not feel palm or fingers at all.

The afternoon he went home, his head was full of clamoring phrases. Snippets of anatomy floated past, chased by statements about physical therapy, muscle and nerve damage, and the cruel optimism that someday he might regain "some" function.

After a strained dinner with his friends, Neal sat on the couch for the rest of the evening and stared at the wall, while the rough music of medicalese played endlessly in his brain.

By the time he went back to the office, he'd taught himself to print his name left-handed. The letters were large, ungainly, and cost him more labor than an entire sketch once would have. He could hardly bear to look at them.

He endured the welcome back, even smiling as the Harvard Crew presented him with a pinstriped sling to replace the ugly hospital version. Someone made a too-hearty comment about how glad they were he was back, and how after all, he didn't need to be able to paint forgeries to detect them. Neal was careful not to show how the words burned—but later on, he found paperwork on his desk that sported his old, dashing signature.

He buried himself in case files and didn't speak a word for the rest of the afternoon.

That night, he had the first dream. In the sweating, trembling aftermath, he was walking to the kitchen for a glass of water, when the battered old copy of _Gray's Anatomy_ caught his eye.

He took it to the couch and turned the pages slowly until he found what he was looking for, then stared at it for over an hour.

That was the first time, but over the months, he went back to it again and again. Somehow, he would find his feet carrying him to the bookshelf; would find the book open on his lap, while his arm lay quiescent beside it.

Again and again: after torturous physical therapy sessions; after work took him into the presence of art; after yet another operation to remove the agonizing clumps of nerve tissue that were healing wrong. And always, always after the nightmares—when he woke so rigid with memory, with trying to contain the waves of despair and anger and grief, that it often took half an hour before he could find the strength to move.

It became a ritual.

Stripped of his shirt, his eyes and his left hand would slowly trace the contours of a limb that no longer seemed to belong to him. The inert muscle cratered with scar tissue. The hand always slightly curled. The place on the third finger now missing the old callus from pencil, brush, carving tool.

He would try, futilely, to rub out the phantom aches, in hopes that it would ease the hollow, burning stretch lodged deep within his chest.

Then he would open the book to plate 413...the cross-section of an upper arm.

Sometimes the book ended up flung across the room, and sometimes he'd just stare until the image became white noise, loud enough to drown out the cacophony in his head.

And sometimes his eyes would trace the fragile cross-hatching and precise outlines with assiduous care, though the image was already indelibly etched into his memory.

Plate 413: an illustration of what he could no longer do...and why.

* * *

**Author's postscript: **It's been brought to my attention that I may not have been totally clear in explaining this little exercise. So: these are not cumulative! They are designed as thematically linked standalone scenarios, not one overarching storyline. Neal is not losing ALL of his senses, just one (and only that one) in each ficlet. Thanks for the feedback! :)


	4. Fool's Gold

**Title: **Senseless: Fool's Gold  
**Author:** QWERTYfaced  
**Fandom:** White Collar  
**Wordcount:** ~1100  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Characters:** Neal Caffrey  
**Genre:** Angst  
**Notes:** Part 4 of 5 of the "Senseless" exercise: hearing. [Depression and Neal!whump.]  
**Summary:** Neal Caffrey always thought he lived by his wits, but then something deprives him of one of his senses. One premise, five short standalone scenarios, each progressively whumpier. (It's a new word.)  
**Disclaimer:** This is a work of fanfiction. All characters and settings belong to their respective copyright holders, not me. Which is why I don't have a robotic maid yet.

* * *

In the old days, when he'd been himself, Neal had once gone to see an art installation on silence and emptiness.

It was nothing more than a room, but the walls captured every sound, while the soft floor stole your footsteps, and the ceiling smothered breathing and heartbeat. He'd wandered every inch of it. The mellow golden color of everything made it curiously as though he was moving, effortlessly, through honey. His eyes focused on the tiniest details—a hairline crack in a panel, a place where the carpet pile was swirled—and ignored the space itself.

He left after some while, disconnected and bemused, as a man is who has been walking in dreams. It took half an hour more before he came back to earth; before he fully regained a sense of self, of perspective, or of space. And he never could remember just how big the room had been or how long he'd spent in it.

If you could never leave that room, he'd wondered, how would you ever come back to earth? How long would it be before the dream became a nightmare?

Nightmares begin when things are abruptly strange and horrible, and you have no idea why.

Later, of course, he would read the reports and the medical charts. He would read about the botched mission and the attack, the fractured skull and the surgeries. He would read, but he would never _know_, in the same way that it is impossible to truly know history...because he couldn't remember it at all.

For Neal, it all began at the hospital.

The first thing he could recall was waking up to see his arm lying atop a knit blanket. There were wires, and tubes, and tape, and he spent several seconds just looking at it all, turning his wrist back and forth in wonder, while his eyes found the tiny bruises and puncture marks of former attachments.

It was all oddly peaceful. But then there was a sudden dip of the mattress, as Mozzie thumped it, then ran out of the room. When he came back, followed by a nurse, Neal stared while their lips moved, until their cheerful smiles faded into worried frowns.

He tried to say something, anything, to bring the smiles back, but had to stop in confusion when he couldn't hear his own voice.

Shortly thereafter, Elizabeth came in with a tremulous smile on her lips and squeezed his hand, then made way for Peter. The FBI agent looked rumpled and upset. After awkwardly patting Neal's shoulder, Peter parked himself in the bedside chair. He stayed firmly planted until visiting hours were over.

One day, Neal spent half an hour in a small room with headphones over his ears, watching a technician press switches and make notes. At one point, he heard a faint beeping in one ear. He obediently signaled and waited for more, but it never came.

The next couple of days...blurred. He was still too dazed by circumstance to care when, allowed up for the first time, he lost his balance and fell despite the medical aide's best efforts. The overbed table bruised him from neck to waist, yet somehow, it didn't seem to matter. He could tell Peter was chewing the staff out, afterward, but without being able to hear his anger, none of it was quite real.

When Neal finally went home, he took with him several prescriptions, endless sheaves of notes on deafness and prognosis, and a sense of detachment that lasted until he went in to get his hearing aid.

It wasn't a success.

It wasn't loud. But after weeks of silence, spent reading or sketching, it was positively assaultive. He automatically lurched away from that side, and only Peter's quick reaction—always startling, when someone touched him without warning—saved him from falling out of the chair.

Even once he'd calmed down, the hearing aid didn't help much. Neal ended up staring at the audiologist's desk, elbows propped on it and fingers laced behind his neck, while waves of hollow, incomprehensibly garbled sound washed over him. He could tell people were trying to talk to him, but it was like having a subway terminal speaker implanted in one ear.

In the end, Peter took him home. For the first time, the vertigo that overtook him on the stairs made his throat burn with misery as well as nausea. He put the hearing aid in its box and shoved it to the back of a shelf, then went to his stereo system and brushed away the dust.

The last record he'd listened to had been Beethoven's _Eroica_. Neal pressed play, then sat on the floor with his hands pressed to the speakers until his fingers were nearly numb from the vibrations.

By the time he went back to the office, he was at least no longer staggering like a drunkard. He knew, however, that he was hardly a model of grace. Unless he paid attention, he constantly found himself hunching his shoulders forward. It was, perhaps, an instinctive defense against a world where so much had become unknowable—where nothing quite made sense anymore, and a sudden shock could come from a barreling car whose horn he couldn't hear, or even from an unexpected tap on the shoulder.

It was all too easy to be taken unawares. He was standing against a lot of walls and watching a lot of doors, these days...and he'd installed two new locks at the apartment, just so that he could sleep.

Even so, he was exhausted all the time. And the first conference room meeting was grueling.

There were so many things he had to read, constantly: monitor, screen, files, faces. A member of the Harvard Crew transcribed the proceedings in real-time, and Mozzie had taught Neal the basics of lip-reading, but he constantly found himself lost. The few times he managed to catch up enough to venture a hesitant comment, he had to scan the whole room after every phrase. People told him that his speech was still fine, but the words that had once flowed so easily stuck in his throat.

Silence, once an abstract, had become a constrictive, suffocating monster.

When he got home, he was often too tired to eat. He would simply crawl into bed and let the crushing weight of silence push him deep into the mattress.

And sometimes, he thought wistfully of that golden room, years before.

It had a door. You could leave whenever you liked.


	5. The Philosophy of Darkness

**Title:** The Philosophy of Darkness  
**Author:** QWERTYfaced  
**Fandom:** White Collar  
**Wordcount:** ~1200  
**Rating:** PG-13  
**Characters:** Neal Caffrey  
**Genre:** Angst  
**Notes:** Part 5 of 5 of the "Senseless" exercise: sight. [Major depression and Neal!whump. It's pretty dark, and hints around the edges of suicidal ideation, so please don't read if it could be triggery for you.]  
**Summary:** Neal Caffrey always thought he lived by his wits, but then something deprives him of one of his senses. One premise, five short standalone scenarios, each progressively whumpier. (It's a new word.)  
**Disclaimer:** This is a work of fanfiction. All characters and settings belong to their respective copyright holders, not me. Which is why I don't have a wingéd unicorn yet.

* * *

Darkness, it turned out, was so much more than an absence of light. It was paradox, contradiction. It was a war and a twisted philosophy.

Sometimes Neal wished that he had more of a talent for hatred. It would be so much easier to give himself over to hatred, so much easier than this maelstrom of sorrow and anger and longing and bewilderment at everything, at the sheer depths of human viciousness. It would be easier than this endless regret, the Möbius strip of those two most soul-sickening words:

_If only._

If only they had never taken that case; if only the man, the man it would be so much easier just to _hate_ with passionate singularity, had less of that talent for hatred himself, or had more of a talent for escape than for art forgery.

If only Neal had not had that drink, purportedly old whiskey, purportedly from Mozzie.

If only he had stopped to reflect that a man who can almost flawlessly reproduce masterpieces can certainly reproduce handwriting.

If only he had realized what was happening sooner.

Memory was searing. It had been a long, slogging couple of weeks at work, and Neal never did like putting other art forgers away, so when he saw the dusty bottle of liquor with its fatal little note, he thought, well, why not? A little nightcap to smooth the day's rough edges, to soothe away the aches.

It had the gentled bite of something aged long in the barrel—went down nice and easy, then straight to his head. Two glasses were enough to send him stumbling to the bed with his brain spinning, but all he thought, as he consigned himself to an intensely beguiling sleep, was that was what he got for drinking while so worn out.

It never, never occurred to him that what he would really get from those innocently-taken drinks was darkness.

The next day, the worst hangover of his life slowly progressed into blurred vision, a crushing migraine, stomach pain that consumed him from the inside out. Peter found him in the men's room, heaving uncontrollably, while the tiles flashed and wavered in front of his eyes. He was too miserable to protest the rush to the hospital, but by that time, it was already too late.

Methanol. He had methanol in his blood. Not much, anymore. Not much, because it had become something else, something awful, shredding him, _destroying_ him, all because of a drink and a man with a genius for hating.

The last thing he saw, before the shimmering, expanding blackness took over, was a clouded and almost unrecognizable Peter.

He had to learn a lot of things over the weeks that followed, but the lesson that came easiest and the lesson that came hardest were one and the same: that darkness was an ideology, a crazed one always at odds with itself. Peter practiced leading him; Neal practiced being led. As they tacked erratically around the hallways, Neal discovered that it is possible to be both pathetically grateful and powerfully resentful, at the same time and at the same person. He needed that hand on his elbow, steady and reassuring; he loathed it, the tension of anger/worry in that touch; he loathed that he needed it, and how helpless it all made him.

There was nothing left that was simple, nothing without duality. Everything that was designed to give him back independence also stressed that it had been taken away; every coping mechanism he was taught gave him strength, while underlining his vulnerability. Peter talked about how he would still be useful at the office (relief mixed with abject fear, because he didn't know how, appreciated the chance, didn't know what would happen if he _failed_), about all the ways they would adapt, all the devices that would adapt for him. He felt valued and worthless.

And June...June, wonderful and damnable June...

When he finally went home, he found that she'd spent _hours_ affixing tiny round labels to everything, then spent hours more recording herself on the slim little device she gave him. He could press the device to a label on a suit and hear her saying _dove-gray herringbone, silk and wool_; could walk into the kitchen, where every setting on the stove had its own label.

Her consideration and selfless generosity undid him, devastated him in every way. It was so kind. It was so cruel. How could he tell her that behind his very genuine thankfulness, his stomach roiled with nausea at the sound of her voice describing his life?

He could only hope that no one else suspected his inner turmoil. He could only hope that June didn't begin to understand, when he asked her to store his art supplies and all his work, that it was because destroying them was unbearable and not destroying them was unbearable—that as unable as he was to live with them anymore, he wanted them kept just as fervently as he wanted them gone.

It was an interminable barrage, a siege against his sanity. But even that was better than the times when darkness showed its other side, showed that it was a paradox even to itself, and he went from feeling too much about everything to feeling nothing about anything. The switch was terrifyingly unpredictable and could happen in an instant.

At such times, he could sense the shadows living inside his body, but he couldn't tell whether they were pouring into him from the world of darkness, or whether they were pouring _out_ of him and that was why the world was dark. Or maybe he was simply dissolving, and it didn't matter, because the bleak emptiness was the same inside and out and soon wouldn't even be separated by skin. He could sense all this, wonder about it, but not care. He could disappear, and not care.

That always scared Neal, when the switch flipped again. Scared him, fascinated him, and then scared him all over again. Yes, the storm of feeling was better than that. It had to be.

He told himself that, trying to make the message stick, trying to accept what life was now. When he was alone in the apartment one night, and his cane fell and rolled far out of his reach, he repeated it like a mantra while he dropped to his hands and knees to grope and crawl for the hated, necessary thing. He tried hard to believe it when he collided head-first with a piece of furniture he'd forgotten about and went sprawling. He tried harder when Peter picked that moment to show up, checking on him.

_I'm so glad you're here. Please, go away. I want to be alone. Don't leave me alone._

Neal wanted to say it all, but he couldn't say anything. He didn't realize he was crying until Peter awkwardly knelt down and blotted his cheeks with a handkerchief. Once he did realize, he couldn't stop.

He wondered if the tears would stain the white cloth black, if he was weeping inky shadows. It was a mad thought, but then, it was a mad world.

He'd learned that, from the philosophy of darkness.


End file.
